Month: December 2012

Let’s listen to a song. Beck’s ‘Loser’ could be a good place to start. It was his first and biggest hit, an iconic single of the early 1990s and a very cool track indeed.

The song begins with a six-note riff played with a slide on the bottom three strings of an acoustic guitar with the low E string tuned down a tone to D, so it’s a sliding chord of D, A, D – no nasty third to suggest major or minor, just the spectral tonic, fifth and octave. Durr dur-durr dur-durrrr, durrrrrr; durr dur-durr dur-durrrr, durrrrr… The slide is picking up the F, to give a bluesy cast to the riff, unavoidable when playing with a slide anyway, but the almost atonal downward slide (from no particular note to no particular note somewhat lower down the neck) give the basically rather ominous riff a slightly offhand, casual edge, as if the guy wants to play the blues but doesn’t really feel like he’s got the right.

The riff is repeated once, and then the fat beats kick in. It’s probably a sample of someone and they were probably from New Orleans, given that ‘Loser’ is known to be built on a sample from Dr John’s ‘I Walk On Gilded Splinters’. The beats have a relaxed, kickback feel but also have an edge provided by the second snare hit just before the third beat in each bar; the snare drum wants to get ahead, but keeps being restrained by the imperious kick drum. After a couple of bars we get a big, deep, fat bass line, proceeding from the D to the E, then back to D, then to F sharp, then back to D, then to E again, then back to D, like a man who keeps leaving the house and then has to keep going back because he’s forgotten something. (The riff doesn’t repeat exactly but proceeds to G the second time round, a little further again, before repeating itself from the top.) The peculiar marriage of stoned bluesy slide guitar, fat bass and dancefloor beats establishes itself, just long enough for us to get to know it, and then the drums drop out for a bar and the song begins.

Before we get to the singing and the words, let’s just take a moment to notice the other instrumental element that enters at this point: the bass drops out, and what sounds like a sitar (possibly an electric sitar) comes in, exactly doubling the bassline. And it sounds kind of Indian, or Indianoid. The music listener who knows 60s popular music immediately thinks – aha, drugs! Yeah, it’s getting a little trippy, but we’re way ahead of that, because the singer has started singing, or rather drawling, a song:

In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey
Butane in my veins and ‘m out to cut the junky with the
Plastic eyeball, spraypaint the vegetables
Dogfood stalls with the beefcake pantyhose,
Kill the headlights and put it in newsreel
Stock car flaming with the loser on the cruise control
Baby’s in Reno with the vitamin D
Gotta couple of couches, sleep on the love seat
Someone keeps sayin’ I’m insane to complain
About a shotgun wedding and the state of my shirt
Don’t believe everything that you breathe, you get a
Parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve, so
Shave your face with some Mace in the dark
Savin’ all your foodstamps and burnin’ down the trailer park
Yo!
Cut it.

Before we’ve even got to the chorus, it’s clear that this is not a song that’s going to yield a clear meaning, or ready consolation, or cheap thrills, or anything else for certain, other than this drawled barrage of grungy images: drugs, consumer products, graffiti, dodgy food (dogfood rubbing up against ‘beefcake’, which normally means pictures of sexy men but in the context you can’t help thinking about supermarket mince), sketching a vivid image of a crapsack life where your shirt needs to be complained about and the credulous are given traffic summonses and maggots and you’re shaving in the dark with attack repellent and then your trailer park burns down. There are hints, here, of some sort of story, but we can’t piece it together. In the ‘time of chimpanzees’ the narrator was a ‘monkey’ – we don’t know if Beck knows his zoology, but humans and chimpanzees, being apes, are closer related to each other than they are to monkeys, who are a different parvorder. The implication is that the narrator, whoever he is, feels unfashionably less-than-human.

His voice – tight and raised, but also deadpan, not even trying to sell this lyric to us – sounds like he thinks he ought to be aggrieved but can’t quite get it together enough to be genuinely angry. He’s mumbling half to himself like a crazy homeless guy. But then the chorus kicks in. Does it make things any clearer?

And there it is, the chorus that sold this song. Helpfully, like a Sesame Street skit, it’s (at least partly) translated into Spanish as well as in English – non-Spanish speakers like me took years to realise that he was even singing in Spanish. I thought it was just a mumble so stoned that you couldn’t make it out. (Beck achieves extra stonedness here by double-tracking his own vocal.) So he’s a loser, but not so much that there isn’t someone in his life that he can’t address as ‘baby’ – he’s not as much of a loser as the eponymous creep in Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ is a creep, for example. He asks her why she doesn’t kill him, but it doesn’t sound like he really expects her to do so, his unhurried descent to the tonic on ‘so why don’tcha kill me’ making it sound more like a droll rhetorical question than a plea for escape from this life. The fact is, she hasn’t killed him. Yet. But we’re only one verse in. What’s next?

Forces of evil in a bozo nightmare
Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber
Cuz one’s got a weasel and the other’s got a flag
One’s on a pole, shove the other in a bag
With the rerun shows and the cocaine nosejob
The daytime crap of the folksinger slob
He hung himself with a guitar string
Slap the turkey neck and it’s hangin’ from a pigeon wing
You can’t write if you can’t relate
Trade the cash for the beef for the body for the hate
And my time is a piece of wax, fallin’ on a termite
‘s chokin’ on the splinters

The second verse spins the song onto a new level of panic. Suddenly we’re talking about banning music and a ‘phony gas chamber’, raising the spectre (for this listener) of Nazism and its defenders, specifically those Holocaust deniers who pick around the ruined crematoria at Auschwitz and pronounce that there’s not enough physical evidence in the brickwork that the places were actually used to slaughter people, despite the mountains of documentary evidence and testimony to the effect that they were. Then we move onto four people, or things – the forces of evil? – who respectively have a weasel (use weasel words, maybe, suggesting appalling things about the forces for good, but never coming out and openly accusing them – their special brand of evil is weaselly and never lets itself get into open confrontation), have a flag (they hide behind patriotism as an excuse), are on a pole (or poll – they could be running for office, or else they’re just standing high above the muck that the rest of us have to live in) and the other is to be shoved in a bag with the rubbish of old TV and the burned-out folksinger who hung himself. The ghost of Phil Ochs is being beckoned to the table, and as before it’s all mixed-up with the detritus of the narrator’s life – the juxtaposition of ‘turkey neck’ and ‘pigeon wing’ make this listener think of plastic-wrapped trays of supermarket chicken wings, this time round.

But then there’s something approaching a cover-breaking announcement: ‘You can’t write if you can’t relate / Trade the cash for the beef for the body for the hate’, a brilliant if gnomic couplet that brings together the financial transactions of being a musician, the need to make a living, the pained identification with predecessors, and the inevitable disillusionment as you live out the same shit that your influences went through. In the end, as the narrator spits out, his time is ‘chokin’ on the splinters’ – partly a reference to the Dr John song that’s being sampled but also a confession of his inability to articulate what all the horror he’s been talking about really amounts to.

In response to the narrator’s dumbfounded tongue-tied-ness, the chorus is practically revelling in the sheer lunacy of it all – get crazy with the Cheese Whiz! – and just before we go to a drum break, as if to take a rest from dwelling on the crapness that has made our hero into such a loser, we get the sublimely weird and funny image of a ‘drive-by body-pierce’, as if gangs are forcibly decorating people with bits of jewellery.

We need a break from the horror, and we’re given one. Everything drops out except the beats. During the break, the narrator mumbles ‘Yo, bring it on down’ and is answered by a chorus of stoners droning what sounds like ‘Oyyyyyyy…’ As the song reassembles itself, we get a bit of backwards singing (it’s the chorus, as if it’s going to make any more sense when sung backwards) and then more and more licks and samples are piled on top of each other – a soothing electric guitar figure played with the vibrato knob turned up, the sitar again, the bass.

Then, just as we’re almost relieved that the narrator isn’t going to overload us with another barrage of surreal horror from his life, a new voice says confidently ‘I’m a driver, I’m a winner,’ and then the music drops out, as if to expose the speaker as much as possible, while he complacently asserts ‘Things are gonna change, I can feel it.’ This listener had always assumed that this was a sample of former President George H.W. Bush on the campaign trail, doggedly trying to seem like a folksy, straightup guy. But it isn’t. It’s dialogue from the movie ‘Kill the Moonlight’ directed by Beck’s friend Steve Hanft. The lines are uttered by one character during a scene when he’s fishing with another character, who I think is his father, but not having seen the entire movie (almost nobody has seen the entire movie) I can’t be sure.

Then we return to the chorus, and the loser is still regretfully but half-defiantly declaring his loserness, even as the narrator cries in a cracking voice ‘I can’t believe it!’, or possibly ‘I can’t believe you!’ (the sources disagree, what do you want from me, he could be singing either of them). The chorus repeats as the song begins to fade, and the narrator, having recovered some of his composure, asks in a smirking, stoned voice (albeit in incorrect German) ‘Sprechen sie Deutsche, baby?’ Because you’ll to need to be able to, in the world that’s coming.

The instrumental track fades, and a new voice (sounds to me like an African-American speaker, but I may be wrong) asks tersely ‘Know what I’m sayin’?’ even as an entirely new musical element enters – cheesy block chords played on a highly distorted electric guitar.

So this is my own modest sketch of the connotational landscape of Beck’s ‘Loser’, in spite of its authors’ own words that the lyrics were basically nonsense andthat the chorus came out of Beck listening to his own attempts to rap and commenting ‘I’m such a loser’ because he didn’t sound enough like Chuck D. People who write things aren’t always the best at figuring out what they might mean, especially when what they’ve written appears to make little or no literal sense. To me, ‘Loser’ is not a song like, say, Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, or Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ – it’s not a coherent and angry song about the ways in which America can betray itself. What it is, rather, is a highly effective sound picture of what it’s like to feel that America is a nightmare. I don’t think that the song’s writers, Beck Hansen and Carl Stephenson, think that America is a nightmare; but haste and urgency made them put the song together a certain way and I’ve tried to demonstrate that it has an inner coherence of its own, no matter what the guys who made it thought of it.

Eric Bana sometimes seems a bit lost in American film, as if they just don’t know what to do with him, or he doesn’t know what they ought to do with him, which isn’t quite the same thing. He was a Good Bloke in Troy, and a Good Bloke in The Time Traveller’s Wife, and a somewhat more interesting Good Bloke in Funny People, where at least his sense of humour was allowed to show. He was very good in Munich, doing his best with a rather glum character, in much the same way that he was a Bad Guy in the Star Trek movie, perfectly fine in a not-very-interesting role that many other actors could have played. Anyone who hasn’t seen Eric Bana’s Australian work must wonder why he’s got leading man status. I mean, apart from the fact that he’s good-looking and a good actor, how did he get to be up there with Pitt and Rush and Cox and Craig and so on?

People who think like that must not have seen Bana in Andrew Dominik’s 2000 movie ‘Chopper’, in which Bana takes the title role of Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read, a real-life Australian career criminal, and doesn’t just run with the role but boots it clear out of the park. Bana’s performance in ‘Chopper’ makes a good movie into a really, really good movie. It has that quality that David Thomson identified in Cary Grant, of being simultaneously charming and repellent, except that Chopper is the kind of character that Grant would never have played in a million years, a foul-mouthed, gap-toothed, beer-bellied Australian skanger with a penchant for extreme violence and a truly surreal code of personal honour. The really surreal thing about the movie is that it’s based on Read’s own autobiographical works. In any other movie like this – SPOILER ALERT! – the main character would have to die in a hail of bullets at the end. Read didn’t. He ended up becoming a celebrity. I first heard of him when I was briefly in Adelaide in 1999, and I went into a bookshop and asked if they had any books by Mark Brandon Read. The middle-aged saleslady looked doubtful for a moment, then said, ‘Oh yes, Chopper Read’ and led me to the true crime section.

I could go on about this movie for hours, but instead I want to focus on one scene from early on in the film. It takes place in 1978. Chopper, as a young criminal (Bana looking most like himself, lean and handsome) finds himself in Pentridge Prison with his accomplices. During a communal period, he’s relaxing in a room with his guys when an older criminal with notably slicked hair warns him not to cross a certain line on the floor, which separates Chopper and his mates from the serious crims.

Keith: See that line there? That’s your side of the yard. Stay that side of the yard, we’ll stay this side.

Bana looks at the older guy with a strangely blank expression – not like he’s angry, just like he can’t figure out the point of this remark. Then he turns and walks back to his mates.

Keith: Good, ya got that, knucklehead.

Chopper whispers to a friend.

Chopper: What’s he done to his hair?
Shane: It’s boot polish, mate.

The friend sniggers, highly amused but clearly knowing his own place in the hierarchy.

Chopper: [to himself] Poor old bugger.

He straightens up.

Chopper: Nice to see your bald patch has gone, Keith.

Keith keeps walking up and down, stroking his boot-polished bald patch with his hand and keeping an eye on Chopper.

Chopper: Naa, looks good, mate. I like it.

Keith’s smirk is starting to fade, at this point.

Chopper: [matter-of-factly] So you’re not gonna get me, then, Keithy.

His mates give him a startled glance.

Keith: [amused] Not worth doin’ any more time over ya, matey.

Chopper: [in the manner of someone explaining the rules to a child] Aw, Keithy, you’d get off on self-defence. Alls you’d gotta do is kill me, present me psychiatric records to the court, there’s not a jury in the land that would convict ya.

Keith: [forced chuckle] You’re fuckin’ sick, Read, you’re insane.

Chopper calmly extracts a roll-up from his pocket.

Chopper: [amiably] Beethoven had his critics too, Keith. See if you can name three of ’em.

This last insult is oddly inappropriate, since Chopper’s the only one of his crew who doesn’t have an untidy mop of hair – his own hair is closely-cropped, almost military.

Chopper: [pretending to be hurt] Aw, Keith, I always thought I was a good bloke.

Keith: [halting at last and looking at him] What’d you ever do that was good?

Chopper: [cheerfully] Well, I bashed you. That was good wasn’t it? It was good for a bit of a giggle, anyway. Eh Keithy?

There then follows a scene in which Chopper’s friend asks him why he has to keep attacking Keith, who’s the head of the ‘painters and dockers’. ‘No,’ says Chopper, ‘out there he’s the head of the painters and dockers. In here he’s just another bare bum in the shower.’

Shane: Why do ya hate him so much?
Chopper: I don’t hate him. I don’t hate anybody.
Shane: Well, why have we been fightin’ him for three fuckin’ years then?
Chopper: [pause, thinks – this question has apparently never occurred to him] I dunno.
Shane: Well, maybe we should have a reason.
Chopper: Well, make one up!

The scene after that sees Chopper returning to the exercise yard, looking preoccupied, staring at the ground, breathing quickly, his mouth tightly shut. The prison officers usher him and lock up after him. He stands for a moment, staring at the floor, then looks up to where Keith is pacing up and down as usual. And then, without saying anything and without any provocation whatsoever, Chopper strides over to Keith, grabs him by the scruff of the neck, pulls a knife out of his pocket and stabs Keith in the face nine times, screaming as he does so, then lets him drop and walks to the other end of the room.

Keith sinks to the floor, in the middle of a widening pool of blood. Bana stares at him, with an extraordinary expression on his face as if he’s almost regretful, as if Keith has done him some terrible injustice by letting himself be stabbed in the face. The camera stays on him and he keeps looking at Keith with this weird mixture of compassion and something like disgust, as if how-could-it-have-come-to-this, when the truth is it was all Chopper’s idea, if it was an idea at all. Bana looks like he’s going to cry; in fact, he actually chokes back his tears, mutters ‘Shit!’ and starts walking over to Keith.

Chopper: [apparently genuinely concerned] You all right Keith? Eh?

Keith, vainly trying to stem the blood pumping from his face and neck, struggles to push himself backwards, away from Chopper. Chopper seems like he genuinely wants to reassure Keith.

Chopper: [earnestly] It’s all right, Keith, you’re not gonna bleed to death, mate. Alright? They called the screws. The screws are comin’.

He takes out a cigarette and goes to light it.

Chopper: You want a cigarette, Keith?
Keith: [hoarsely] Get away from me.

Chopper lights his cigarette while Keith flounders in the huge pool of blood on the floor.

Chopper: It’s all right, mate. [He tosses the cigarette to Keith.] Have a cigarette, Keith.

Keith manages to hurl the cigarette back at him. Chopper looks hurt.

Chopper: Keithy – hey, come on, mate.

He gives up trying to be friendly.

Chopper: You don’t much like me, do ya, Keith.
Keith: [by now covered in blood] You bash people for no reason, just to make a name for yourself. You’re a fuckin’ idiot.

Chopper looks fleetingly annoyed.

Chopper: [quietly] I’m not the dumb cunt who’s pissin’ blood, Keith. All right? I’m the one who runs the division, mate. Make no mistake about that, alright?

By the time the screws actually arrive, Chopper has recovered his composure.

Chopper: [stepping back to reveal Keith lying on the floor in the pool of blood] Keith seems to have done himself a mischief.

Unfortunately, Chopper planned to simply swap places with Keith in the power structure, but everything goes awry when Keith dies of his injuries. The result is that the dockers in the prison put out a ten-grand contract on Chopper’s life. A senior prison officer warns him that he’s in danger, but Chopper can’t believe it will happen.

Chopper: All sounds a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? I mean, who are they gonna get to do it?

Nevertheless, Chopper starts taking it seriously enough to conceive a plan whereby he and his mates will take the entire division hostage and he’ll personally paralyse every other prisoner with an icepick, just to guarantee that nobody will attack him. This gets his friends worried enough to do something.

Which brings us to the scene in the film that pushes Bana over the top into awesomeness.

Chopper, Jimmy and Bluey are alone in the cell that they’ve been confined to, pacing up and down and smoking. Jimmy suddenly turns and apparently punches Chopper in the stomach.

Jimmy punches Chopper again, and this time Chopper flinches, spits and wipes his mouth with his thumb, leaving a smear of blood.

Chopper: [puzzled] What’s the matter with you?

Jimmy stares at him and backs away slowly. Chopper looks down and sees that he’s bleeding. Jimmy has stabbed him. He watches the blood dripping onto the toe of his polished prison shoe. He looks up at Jimmy, gauging the situation. Jimmy seems tense. The camera pans down to see the knife in Jimmy’s hand. Chopper looks at it, then looks at Jimmy again.

Chopper: [calmly] Just hang on a second.

Holding up one hand to calm Jimmy, he slowly returns the half-built roll-up in his other hand to his coat pocket.

Chopper: [patiently] What are ya doin’.

Jimmy runs up to him and stabs him again. Chopper doesn’t move, but just keeps looking at Jimmy with the same calm stare. He looks, if anything, slightly puzzled.

Chopper: What’s got into you?

Jimmy stabs him again and Chopper sways and closes his eyes momentarily. Then he turns and walks to the wall, shaking his head slightly as if he can’t figure out what’s going on. Jimmy stands, puzzled, and then Chopper impulsively goes over to him and gives him a hug.

Jimmy stabs him again. Chopper stops, and looks up at him earnestly. Jimmy looks at a loss, and then stabs him yet again. Chopper stands there, forehead-to-forehead with him, looking far more disappointed in Jimmy than like someone who’s being stabbed to death. Then he grabs Jimmy and slams him against the wall, holding him by the throat.

Cut back to Chopper, who’s now removing his shirt, to reveal that his vest is soaked in blood.

Chopper: [disgusted] But you’re bloody useless.

He takes off his vest, revealing the multiple, bleeding stab wounds in his torso. He looks down at himself. Blood is flowing out of his wounds.

Bluey throws up on the floor (according to the director, the actor was so good that he could throw up for real on cue.) Jimmy stares at Chopper, smoke flowing from his mouth. Jimmy stands up and approaches Chopper.

Jimmy: Y’alright, Chop?

Bana is doing an unnerving chewing motion with his jaw, as if he’s trying to stop himself from doing the natural thing under the circumstances, namely writhe on the ground and scream in uncontrollable pain.

Chopper: [as if affronted that Jimmy would even ask this] Yeah, I’m alright.
Jimmy: [OOV] Jesus, mate, does it hurt?

Jimmy helps Chopper lie down – or rather guides him to the floor as Chopper’s strength finally, visibly wears out.

Jimmy: Come on, just lie down.
Bluey: I…I’m sorry, Chop. I’m sorry.

Chopper lies in Jimmy’s arms and sighs, and watches an insect crawling along the wall. Jimmy gives him a cigarette to smoke.

Update 25/06/2013:

Watching this clip again, I’m struck once more not only by Bana’s eerie stillness but also by the brilliant performances of Simon Lyndon as Jimmy and Dan Wyllie as Bluey. Lyndon’s expression, as he backs away after Bana contemptuously tells him to ‘go and sit down’ is a remarkable combination of fear and a sort of fan-love, as if Jimmy has had to stab Chopper partly because he idolises him so much. I already mentioned Dan Wyllie’s remarkable talent for puking on cue, but even though that’s kind of a stunt, one of the reasons this scene works so well is that Bluey is clearly so (literally) gut-wrenchingly terrified of Chopper, even after Chopper has been stabbed several times.

Why did I post this? There’s something about this scene that carries normal masculine behaviour to a degree so extreme that you laugh out of a kind of fear. It’s to do with Bana’s stoicism, as he absurdly refuses to let Jimmy feel that Jimmy’s attack on him has intimidated him to the slightest degree, even as his legs are giving way beneath him. That’s the great and truthful thing about this scene, and I sort of feel that it could only have been pulled off with an actor playing Chopper who had absolutely brazen instincts. And looking at Eric Bana’s career, either he hasn’t been offered parts that enable him to display those instincts, or else he’s been offered but for the most part hasn’t accepted them.

That isn’t to say that he hasn’t been very good in a lot of films; Munich drew on something else that he does very well, that whole sort of troubled-hero thing, and while a lot of good actors can do that, Bana’s one of the few who can convince you that Avner really was a good guy who found himself doing bad things. Still, Chopper — I mean the fictional Chopper — was a bad guy who genuinely believed that he was a good guy, and was even able to persuade you that that was the case, and almost nobody else has ever pulled that off.